Putting the "Jerk" In Knee-Jerk

by Eric Martin

The following passage from David Broder's latest column is receiving all the scorn it deserves.  Actually, check that, it deserves much more.  It is beyond self-parody in its false-equivalency reductionism - one of the premiere efforts from a columnist whose self-appointed mission seems to be to reduce any and all political distinctions to a monochrome, lifeless gruel.  The chef at work:

Was Christmas Day 2009 the same kind of wake-up call for Barack Obama that Sept. 11, 2001, had been for George W. Bush?

The near-miss by a passenger flying into Detroit plotting to blow up an American airliner seems to have shocked this president as much as the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon did the last.

Both presidents had had plenty of warnings in the form of threats and even incidents. But both were caught off guard: Bush reading to a classroom of youngsters; Obama on a family vacation in Hawaii.

That absurdity aside, I wanted to focus on the particulars in a subsequent excerpt - equally wrongheaded, though far more pernicious:

Bush reacted with anger and a determination to punish the people who wreaked the havoc. Obama was just as mad...Like Bush, he vowed to see that the consequences also fell on the foreign country that gave birth to the plot -- Afghanistan eight years ago, Yemen today.

For now, we are conducting a proxy war in Yemen, but that may change. Al-Qaeda's local enablers must learn that there is a price to be paid when Uncle Sam is attacked from their bases. 

Yes, because if there's one thing the United States has shown al-Qaeda and the rest of the world it's that invading foreign countries sure is a cost effective, efficient way to combat a small, transnational terrorist group that isn't tied to any state or location.  The fact that Bin Laden hoped for just such serial military conquests on our part should not cause us to hesitate or reconsider.  It is precisely this type of misinformed gibberish that Leah Farrall has in mind when critiquing knee-jerk bellicosity in the context of Yemen/counterterrorism: 

And when this type of commentary influences decision makers and also creeps beyond AQAP into the issue of Yemen more generally it is extremely concerning, especially when it essentially calls for opening another front in Yemen and escalating US involvement. The lesson of Iraq and to a lesser extent Afghanistan has not been learnt, and it is rapidly becoming the greatest failure of the war on terror: the failure to learn that lionizing al Qaeda only further empowers it. Add this to calls for greater US involvement, especially in a country like Yemen and with the sensitivities this entails, and you have the perfect propaganda recruitment recipe for al Qaeda.

Adam Serwer takes it one step further:

It's not just that we've "failed" to learn this lesson. It's that one of the two political parties in the country has decided their political interests are best served by lionizing al-Qaeda, spinning their failures as successes and treating wannabe terrorists like invincible super-soldiers. The GOP's demands that suspected terrorists be tried by military commission only elevate criminals to the status of uniformed soldiers -- a status that is both consistent with their worldview that the West is "at war" with Islam and more than they deserve. Never mind that the commissions themselves have proven to be slow and inefficient compared to civilian courts. Pete Hoekstra's shameless profiteering off of the failed Christmas bombing shows the GOP's incentive to "lionize" al-Qaeda hasn't changed since the days of Tom Ridge manipulating terror alerts.

In essence, any attempt to implement a sane, effective, rational counterterrorism policy is being sabotaged by the demagogues, as enabled by those liked David Broder who purport to don the mantle of sober centrism.  The "very serious" set, if you will.  But by Broder's forced pretense that refuses to admit of any discernment or difference between the parties and their policies (or at least the  advantage of one over the other) he often becomes incapable of rendering any insight or judgment.  Of course, he occasionaly finds his voice when slagging health care or some similar liberal policy.  This is similar to the press corp writ large's slavish devotion to the he said/she said construct, even where one side is obviously and flagrantly lying.

Regardless, how this myopia ever took on the air of wisdom is beyond me, yet there you have the "dean" of the Washington press corp.

Comments

[Ugh]

Wow, so Obama has both his Katrina (lack of H1N1 vaccine) and 9/11 (some dude set his underpants on fire) in his first year, whereas it took bush more than four years to accomplish such a thing.

Black Jimmy Carter.

[matttbastard]

Awesome. He's back. And this time he's (weakly) appropriated my ID. Yawn.

(Suffice to say, I doubt one would want to click the shortened links. Not that I'm about to check to make sure.)

[Eric Martin]

fixeded

[Uncle Kvetch]

Al-Qaeda's local enablers must learn that there is a price to be paid when Uncle Sam is attacked from their bases.

The banality of evil.

[jrudkis]

I still think ridicule would be the best response to terror, especially in this case: the guy burnt his genitals, failed to blow up the plane, and was captured by a tourist...

Ridicule for Broder is equally appropriate.

[cleek]

al-Q knows exactly how to push our buttons. odd that a raggedy bunch of thugs know more about us than we do.

[Hartmut]

Broder is not even up-to-date on the current GOP talking points. There were no terror attacks under Bush (9/11 was Clinton's fault. What anthrax and what Beltway sniper?) and not Obama's vaction was the main problem but his wasting of time with health (insurance) reform. Also Obama never uses the word terror or terrorist and ignores that 'we are at war' because of his black/Muslim background.
I think even Orwell would be surprised about this degree of blatancy in this rewriting of very recent history.

[RepubAnon]

In Mr. Broder's last life, he was a bull in Spain telling other bulls that they needed to show their determination by charging the red cape whenever the funny-dressed guy waved it at them...

[jdog]

I stopped reading Broder several years ago, because of a particularly inane column (the details of which I have now throughly forgotten). The only time I ever hear about him any more is when someone makes a post on a blog. I suppose I could read him in order to know what he writes, as he has a prominent platform. But that's not worth it.

Quite frankly, Broder is a complete idiot.

[Dr X]

45+ years in Washington is enough to thoroughly pickle a man's brain.